Sometimes you just need to let someone know.

About Concern

Concern was developed from recognising that part of the reason that students can be at risk is because they don’t have a way to easily communicate to the right person when there is a problem.

We wanted to create a path for dialogue that wasn’t intimidating or scary like having to speak to a teacher about a concern. To provide students with an easy way to communicate, where the effort of letting the right person know, is simple.

“Help now!” gets used because right this second what they actually need is help.

How does it work?

Concern is comprised of 5 web forms.

The seriousness or urgency of the submitted concern escalates from Level 1 to Level 5.
Each Concern level has an email field that you set, to route notifications to the appropriate people.
So for each form you need to decide who should receive all the emails from that form.
From there we suggest you treat this as any other notification form a student about their health and safety.

Concern Levels 1-4:

When a concern is submitted it creates a confirmation number (Concern ID) that is displayed on screen and 2 notification emails are sent:

One to the email the student submitted on the form
One to the email address you have entered for that Concern LevelNot specifying an address will route the email to the contact email of your Concern Account

The Concern ID is generated incase a fake concern is submitted, it allows the student whose email was used respond and let you know that it is not a real concern.

Concern Level 5:

When a Level 5 concern is submitted it can also generate an SMS to the staff member, assuming an SMS To number is provided in the Concern Level 5 customisation.

Now you know how it works you are better placed to align it to your Digital Citizenship procedures.

Are you readyfor Concern?

Before subscribing to Concern we suggest that you consider the following to ensure Concern will be a success at your school.

Do you have a person able to deal with these concerns?

Do you have a Director of ILT or is this more suited to your Director of Wellbeing who is ready to handle these submissions?
Maybe both of those titles are never going to exist at your school, so who would be responsible?

Do you have a plan on how to integrate Concern with your existing policies and procedures?

In some schools Concern submissions will be routed to different people, and in others, it would all go to the same person. Do you already know where the submissions will enter your existing processes?

Does your school have supportive Policies around Digital Citizenship?

Maybe this is a great place to start, if you need help developing strategies we may have people that can help you at Eyks.

The information that is submitted through Concern is some of the most potentially volatile and dangerous information your school will ever deal with. So yes the password requirement is “Strong”, because we can’t set it any higher.

Password length is the most important thing, make it memorable and easy to type and make it long.